Are You Lost?
by Mazmaraz
Summary: A rather dubious friendship develops between two schoolmates when Heero discovers that appearances are generally not all they seem. But what could cause Duo to be so drastically different when not surrounded by his usual crowd. AU.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Are you lost?  
  
Summary: A rather dubious friendship develops between two schoolmates when Heero discovers that appearances are generally not all they seem. But what could cause Duo to be so drastically different when not surrounded by his usual crowd. AU.  
  
Disclaimer: Dun own it. Real bummed.  
  
I shut down my laptop and wandered out to the lounge room to find that Duo had once again fallen asleep on the couch, curled into the armrest with an arm wrapped loosely around his knees, his head tilted backwards and his mouth wide open and drooling. It was becoming a rather common occurrence and I wasn't yet sure whether I minded or not. For the moment, I'd decided to just accept that a guy I normally would never have bothered even talking to was occasionally, and quite randomly, spending the night at my house either lost in thought or completely dead to the world to the point where dropping him on the floor wouldn't get him to twitch an eyelid.  
  
I thankfully didn't have to carry him to the spare room tonight as J was away at a reunion, but I wandered over to the couch, yawning, to pull off Duo's shoes and lay him down into a more comfortable position anyway. I sighed as I noticed the motley brown and green bruises littering Duo's arms, wondering once again where they came from. I believed Duo was being abused in some way but I wasn't yet confident enough in our rather dubious friendship to feel that I could confront him without him running away.  
  
There was, of course, the fact that Duo might just be involved in something that I had absolutely no business sticking my nose into. It wasn't like we knew each other well enough to assume things about personal life, and at the moment I wasn't even sure Duo considered me anything but the owner of a rather convenient place to stay. Duo barely even acknowledged me let alone talked to me under normal circumstances and had probably said a total of twenty words in my presence since he'd first slept on the couch, and that was odd in itself. I still had trouble believing that this guy was the same outgoing and confident bloke I competed for top marks and sporting achievements with at school.  
  
Sighing again, I quickly and efficiently checked Duo over for any serious injuries, noting the bruising around his nipples and dark fingermarks that extended below the waistline of his trousers, before I pulled the blanket off the recliner and tucked it around him.  
  
I watched him unconsciously snuggle into the couch cushions and the corner of his mouth open slightly as he sighed in his sleep and relaxed again.  
  
Wandering out to the kitchen, I poured a glass of water from the jug in the fridge and sat down at the table, sipping at it slowly.  
  
I didn't want J to come back tomorrow. When he wasn't here I could get away without doing my entire training resume and I didn't have to assure him that I was doing my school work or go to bed at a decent hour. I didn't have to worry about making sure he didn't discover Duo, though I'm sure he knew he was here sometimes. He referred to him as 'that friend'.  
  
Strangely enough I was slightly proud of myself for doing something that J disapproved of. But seriously, how wrong is it to have a friend stay over at your house occasionally.  
  
I snorted slightly at the thought. Wow, Heero Yuy is growing a mind of his own and gaining an extremely mild social life rather than forever following that crackpot scientist that experiments on him. Go you wild thing.  
  
Leaning back in my chair so I could see Duo past the kitchen bench, I felt a silly grin slide onto my face as I thought about the last couple of weeks of my life.  
  
I have a friend.  
  
Well, someone that I would consider a friend.  
  
Now I sound really lame.  
  
Before I accidently ran into Duo Maxwell during my warm down run four weeks ago, my entire life revolved around school and my training. There was nothing else.  
  
My head still spins sometimes as I think about how limited my life was. How limited it still is.  
  
I still remember clearly how messed up I was feeling that night and how oddly it had ended.  
  
My head had been swimming backwards round a whirlpool of...of...something. Something that I don't understand. I'd been feeling washed away and helpless, like I needed something desperately and nothing else mattered as long as I could have it.  
  
I still don't know what it was that I wanted. I didn't manage to figure it out and the events that happened that night distracted me enough in order for me to forget it for quite a while afterwards.  
  
I'd been sitting around moping for half the day before I managed to force myself to get up and run through a revised version of my training schedule then head out into the night to jog around the park and warm down.  
  
It was when I was running past the burnt out old church that I saw him. Unfortunately that was only a mere two seconds before I ran into him so we ended up sprawled in the gutter next to the church gate despite my efforts at dodging him.  
  
He was drunk, and smelt really bad.  
  
It took him a few seconds before he was able to lift himself off me and when he did his movements were uncoordinated, his fingers catching in my shirt and his head tottering slightly as he tried to sit up. He looked down at me and around himself confusedly as if he was trying to figure out just how the hell he'd managed to get there, but then seemed to decide that it didn't really matter and leant against the footpath his eyes settling on me properly.  
  
At this point I was still trying to get my head around the fact that this was Duo. Duo Maxwell. That popular kid that hung out with Trowa, Quatre and Wu Fei. That bloody brilliant student that I attended high school with. That awesome sports star that I competed against.  
  
This was Duo Maxwelll, in a drunken stupor, wandering around the street in a tattered pair of jeans and a shirt that barely existed.  
  
A silent Duo Maxwell.  
  
Clumsy fingers reached up to brush hair out of his face and he shook his head causing him to wobble rather like a newborn kitten. His eyes blinked at me blearily and his fingers curled nervously around his braid which was beginning to look rather worse for wear. After a few seconds of staring at me though, Duo seemed to lose interest and began making himself comfortable right there in the gutter.  
  
I think I gaped at him then. I couldn't believe it. He planned on sleeping in the middle of the street?  
  
For a second I began to wonder if he was homeless but remembered overhearing him mention his house to Quatre once before. There was no possibility of him making it up to Keineston avenue in his current state though, and I doubted he had the money to pay for a taxi even if we could call one in the first place. He didn't even appear to be carrying a wallet.  
  
I eventually decided that if I was going to do anything at all, I'd better make sure he at least got up off the ground so I hauled myself up and reached down to pull him up.  
  
It was like trying to lift a sack of potatoes, he was no help at all; his limbs flailed about as he tried to grab a hold of me to support himself. Even after I managed to get him to stand it didn't look like he was going to stay upright for very long.  
  
Not exactly sure what I was going to do with him I started him walking up the hill with me, figuring that if he was moving he was at least making some sort of progress and maybe once we managed to reach the intersection he might decide he was capable of looking after himself. That was probably really wishful thinking on my part.  
  
We were two houses away from the end of the street when he suddenly collapsed. I grabbed him under the arms and nearly dropped him anyway when he yelped loudly, clutching at my shirt and pushing at me ineffectually as I held onto him trying to keep him on his feet.  
  
Next thing I knew, I was on my back staring up at a few extra stars than what would normally be in the night sky and I realised that a drunk Duo Maxwell had just managed to flip me.  
  
Sitting up and rubbing the back of my aching head I turned to find him on the ground behind me, passed out.  
  
Sick of all the confusion but mildly intrigued all the same, I decided to cart Duo back to my place and hopefully manage to get rid of him before J arrived the following day.  
  
The poor guy was obviously either surviving something really rough or being particularly stupid.  
  
Although neither of those options were really all that appealing.  
  
It was a bit of a struggle trying to carry him back and I must've looked really strange marching up the street with this guy draped over my shoulder. I could only imagine what the neighbours would think if they'd happened to notice me fumbling for my keys on the doorstep.  
  
I'd laid him on the couch and covered him with a blanket before taking a shower and falling into a bed, staring up at the ceiling and debating whether or not to go out there and check on him.  
  
He was injured. You only needed to glance at him to see the numerous bruises and scratches covering his chest, back and arms. But whether or not he'd appreciate a complete stranger treating him for those wounds was another thing entirely. They didn't appear to be life threatening after all.  
  
I eventually came to the decision to talk to him in the morning as it would be inappropriate to approach him when he was unaware and rolled over onto my stomach to go to sleep.  
  
The next time I saw Duo, it was at school and he barely gave me a second glance.  
  
I tilted my chair back from the table again to glance at his form that was once again splayed across my lounge. Tonight he'd been in the alleyway between Howard's mechanics and Muller and Son's. I'd found him there a couple of times, usually lying on the backseat of one of the abandoned cars that Howard had retrieved for parts.  
  
No doubt I'd wake up tomorrow to find the blanket folded on the couch and Duo gone. At school I would again get less than a hello. Maybe a brief nod of recognition.  
  
It was an odd friendship.  
  
I let the chair fall back onto all four legs, gulped down the remaining water in my glass and got up and placed it in the sink.  
  
With a muttered 'Goodnight Duo' as I wandered back through the lounge room. I walked up the hall to my room.  
  
Well here's a beginning to a story which currently has two endings. The characters will probably decide for themselves which one they want, but if you'd like to influence them in anyway, make a suggestion on whether you'd like a sad/lost kind of feeling or a happyish ending. Then it'll end up as relatively short, or indiscernibly long respectively. Either way it's planned. Will take yonks to write, unless someone throws fishing line and a sinker at my head. But you never know. 


	2. Chapter 2

Title: Are you lost?  
  
Chapter 2

/--/--/--/--/  
  
I hate school. I never used to - school was just there, something that you apparently had to do. I always seemed to do well so it never bothered me before, but then I realised how dumb some people are, how dumb most of the staff are, and how utterly stupid half the stuff they try and teach us is.  
  
I've been at the top of my class in every subject including my accelerated ones since I was in kindergarten, but if I was suddenly left alone in the world, I probably wouldn't have a clue how to look after myself. Dr J certainly never taught me, and I was apparently too smart to take the life science classes. They all thought I was way better off learning about planetary motion and the structural make up of cement.  
  
I lived in a box. A tiny, sad, emotionless little box.  
  
Until Duo came along.  
  
It sounds really dumb putting it like that as I have, of course, known Duo for years. It's impossible to go to our school and not know him, and you'd really think I would know him better considering the amount of time we technically spend 'together'.  
  
I'm pretty sure we would've talked at some point, even just to discuss class topics, but he was part of the Winner entourage, and Quatre hated me. If you were friends with Quatre, I was off limits.  
  
I didn't care.  
  
My life was a complete blank. Like I was some....thing they just fed a whole lot of information into. I never used to think anything at all about life or the world or existence. I'd go as far as saying that I didn't believe anyone lived any differently to the way I did even though I was aware that they did.  
  
Maybe life just held no interest to me and it took Duo's....problem, or maybe just Duo, to make me realise that life was worth thinking about. Even if I only started helping him because I didn't have any idea of what else to do with him.  
  
It must've been, I don't know, three weeks after I'd first run into Duo outside the church that Duo started approaching me in the school cafeteria at lunch time and inviting me to join their table. I always turned him down, as I generally preferred to eat outside, but he kept asking anyway. Maybe he felt some sort of obligation to be nice, or it was his way of thanking me for helping him, but I didn't feel the need for either. I wasn't on some charity gig to get attention. I wasn't looking to join the 'in' crowd by helping one of its members. I didn't expect to get anything out of it. I didn't want anything out of it. So I just continued to do it. It wasn't like it was causing me any problems.  
  
I think I confused Duo.  
  
He'd look at me oddly, or stand there staring at me as I walked away. He'd continually glance at me throughout lessons and attempt to start conversations with me. He'd try and intimidate me or face off against me during gym. He even made the effort to rough me up a little once which was less than successful.  
  
A month later things seemed to settle into some sort of routine. I'd do my nightly run and two or three nights a week I'd find Duo. Most of those nights he was at least drunk, but more often than not he looked like he'd been beaten and....well, I'm definitely no expert and I really wouldn't know for sure, but with the bruising and the bleeding I would assume that he had been raped.  
  
Occasionally we were somewhere in the vicinity of Howard's workshop and I could take him there to clean up, but more often than not I'd end up taking him to my place. I'd only tried to take him back to his own home once and it was an unmitigated disaster.  
  
Duo....he....well, as soon as he realised where I was taking him, he tried to fight me off. I ended up with a load of scratches, bruises and a black eye before I pinned him to the ground. When he realised he couldn't beat me he tried other methods, his hands searching, clutching at me, reaching beneath my shirt....I couldn't....it wasn't....he....  
  
It shocked me. What he was doing, I mean.  
  
I didn't let him, of course. I fended him off and tried to scramble away, but I had absolutely no idea what to do when he kept at it so I hit him.  
  
It was disturbing to see him fall back limply, sitting in a forlorn, twitchy, swaying mess on the sidewalk, his head turned to the side as if expecting to be hit again.  
  
What WAS this? Did I even want to KNOW? Did he DO stuff for people? Or did it happen at home? How could he be like....this....NOW, and be so normal at school?  
  
I sat there on the pavement; breathless, panting and staring at him in what was probably disgust whilst trying to figure out what I should do. I find it kind of funny now that none of the things I came up with involved running away and never talking to him again. I still wanted to help him for absolutely no reason at all. He looked so shattered and lost that I just couldn't leave him there alone.  
  
He eventually began to shuffle closer to me again, his jeans and sneakers scraping on the cement as he half crawled half dragged himself over until he was kneeling beside me. When I tried to get up and move away slightly his hand reached out and latched onto the edge of my shirt. I tried to disentangle his fingers but he just twisted them into my hand instead and tried to lean against me. He began to mutter things, asking me not to and pleading, Duo Maxwell pleading for something which I just couldn't understand.  
  
That night freaked me out, to put it bluntly. To have somebody begging and crying into my shirt, so legless that I had to carry them, so insecure they wouldn't leave me alone. I spent most of it on a chair next to the spare bed he was sleeping in, my hand having been commandeered.  
  
After that I wasn't game to try his place again. I couldn't believe he was such a wreck.  
  
So I'd take him to my place when he needed it. He'd stay and be gone by morning. At school he'd strike up a one sided conversation in the lunch line and that was that.  
  
Then he actually came to me.

/--/--/--/--/  
  
A/N: Thankyou very much to the people reviewed, and Sparkle again for RnSing, very much appreciated.


	3. Chapter 3

I guess there was this period of time where things were really strange. I think the comfort level got breached or something and everything became uncertain again - neither of us could figure out how we were supposed to be acting and we didn't know what to do in order to make everything...well, normal again.

It d been perfectly fine when I d dragged him home every second night. There was no problem, he was too drunk to discuss it and in the morning when I woke up he wasn't there. But when he turned up on my doorstep one afternoon; perfectly sober and wondering if he could maybe stay the night. That was a completely different situation.

I mean, what on earth was I supposed to do with him? He was awake...and he was sober....and it was five o clock in the afternoon.... I couldn't exactly show him the guest room and expect him to sleep for fourteen hours.

I didn't even know what you d do with normal friends if I d had any to invite over. How was I supposed to find a suitable pass time for someone like Duo?

As it turned out, I didn't have to try very hard.

After ten minutes of rather awkward silence he asked me if he could borrow my physics text book and we ended up in my bedroom doing homework for nearly four hours. At around nine o clock I heated up two of the meals J had left in the fridge and we ate in silence sitting at opposite ends of the dining table. Then he did go to the guest room and sleep. And that was it.

Day one of Duo sober at my place.

It must've been just as uncomfortable for him as it was for me because for two weeks we went back to me rolling him out of the gutter. Come to think of it he didn't talk to me at school for a while either. He pretty much ignored me completely.

But then I encountered him at the burnt out church before he'd managed to find any alcohol and I somehow invited him over. I wasn't quite sure how I'd managed it as barely any words had been exchanged. It was pretty much Oh...hello. Stand around for five minutes gazing at the broken statue next to the gate. You coming? And he followed me home.

He, understandably, still felt just as uncomfortable as last time so I made an effort to go about my business as I normally would. He told me not to bother with dinner, borrowed my text books and shut himself in the guest room, which was awkward. I felt like I d done something wrong or stepped past one of those invisible lines that everybody else seems to instinctively avoid. It made me feel even worse when I heard him leaving at 2am; I wasn't sure I ever wanted to invite him over again. At least not while he was sober. I briefly wondered whether that was the time he normally left. But it probably wasn't considering the state he was usually in.

If you were drunk and exhausted at nine o clock, you were probably still mostly asleep at 2 am, considering you managed to get there. It was a safe bet that he wasn't yet mobile at that hour normally.

The afternoon that everything became sort of OK didn't start out particularly different from any of our previous sober encounters out of school. I can t really remember it so much now, whether or not I invited him over or whether he just turned up. But I do remember that I wasn't really that pleased to see him and I was being cranky because sober evenings were always stressful.

It must sound really stupid saying something like this but I didn't ever envision my friendship with Duo ever reaching a point where we d have to make general conversation. I'd thought about it and, you know, had pretended I would be good friends with him at some later, indeterminate date, but I didn't believe it would actually happen. It d be nice to have someone to talk to, but to be honest I didn't know how. Conversations were one of those stupidly simple but very complicated things that I just couldn't do. I'm not even sure what it involves. I see other people do it all the time and I listen in and think Yeah, I could do that. But every time I try, the words don't arrive quick enough or they'd laugh at what I'd said, so I was always disinclined to try it again.

I liked the idea of having friends to talk to but in practice it was incredibly annoying.

Duo and I spent a lot of time not talking that afternoon. We spent thirty seconds standing on my doorstep not talking. Twenty minutes at the kitchen table drinking juice and not talking - he gave me a strange look when I did that. Gave him juice I mean. Maybe it s no longer appropriate at our age.

We spent an hour not talking while I pretended to do my maths homework then I decided to avoid eating what Dr J had set out for me so I could attempt to make food just so I didn't have to spend more time not talking to Duo.

I think a total of twelve words got exchanged.

I kept wracking my brains for things to say but nothing was ever forth coming and Duo didn't give me any lead ins so I could only assume he wasn't up to talking either. I don t know what he expected us to do. But maybe he'd already been discouraged from it since I rejected him at school.

By the time it got around to an hour where I thought I could possibly suggest bed and get away with it I was so exhausted from not talking and wracking my brains trying to find something to talk about that I didn t much care that Duo was there just as long as I didn't have to think about it anymore.

I gave him a towel and a set of old clothes then showed him the guestroom and directed him to the bathroom. I was hoping that I could hide out in my room for the rest of the night and he d take the hint and leave me alone. I didn't know why he couldn't just go and hide like he normally did. So if he wasn't going to talk he could not talk while I wasn't there.

Better yet, he could go to sleep and be gone when morning came around.

I was sitting at my desk, fuming quietly when Duo decided he wasn't ready to go to bed and wandered into my bedroom, drying his hair, to sit down on my floor and not talk to me some more.

I blew up, in my very quiet and calm Heero way.

And I think that was the first time that Duo acted anything like the way he did at school, while staying at my place. He poked fun at my bad mood and laughed at me while I growled at him, he prodded me and cajoled me into arguing with him until I wasn't feeling quite so grumpy anymore. It was still a very subdued and tired version of Duo, but he wasn t lost and he was meeting my eyes when he insulted me. And I could see very clearly that he knew I knew that it was all in jest.

I was a little bit confused by it all and things got weird again when we said goodnight, but it was fun. And that broke our stint of horribly awkward sober evenings.

It also paved the way for our in school relationship to become somewhat more what other people would consider to be friends rather than my very poor interpretation of the word.

I'm still trying to determine whether or not that was a good thing.

_________________________

You see those last four paragraphs? That's what's taken me four bleeding years to write. I apologise for the rather lengthy amount of time that has passed, and also for any missing apostrophes. They seem to be deleting themselves. If you spot a missing one, let me know.


End file.
